Poisoning The Press

by Mark Feldstein

  Pearson complained that Hutschnecker had “changed his story completely.” The columnist didn’t believe the doctor’s new, sanitized version. “It seemed to me strange that Nixon should go all the way to New York to consult a well-known Park Avenue psychotherapy specialist concerning his internal medical problems,” Pearson observed, “when some of the best internists in the United States are located [nearby] at Walter Reed Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital where Nixon as Vice President could have had their services on the cuff.” Anderson was unfazed by the psychotherapist’s denial. “Dr. Hutschnecker could not be expected to reveal confidences about Nixon’s condition, and would be in violation of his code if he did,” the reporter recognized. “On the contrary, he could be expected, like all previous doctors of presidential-level patients, to minimize the implications of Nixon’s problem, whatever it was, and he did. But the very fact that Nixon had been under the care of a psychiatrist, whatever the explanation, would probably galvanize the sleeping concern of many that Nixon had emotional problems.”

  Unlike eight years earlier, when the Nixon campaign’s false denial of the Hughes loan gave Anderson and Pearson an excuse to launch their election-eve bombshell, Nixon’s team now kept silent, allowing Hutschnecker to speak for them. “Our position was that any public statement by us in advance would increase interest in a Pearson column and perhaps offer authenticity,” Klein explained. Instead, Nixon’s staff readied its list of newspapers carrying the “Merry-Go-Round” in preparation for lobbying them to suppress the exposé. Still, Klein realized that many papers would publish the story anyway “and thus one damaging column could have tipped the close election.”

  But at the last minute, Pearson decided to pull the plug on his piece. “KILL NIXON STORY,” he wrote at the bottom of the column he had drafted. According to Anderson, Pearson “seemed torn by concerns that a few years before would not have finally inhibited him,” including the fact that “Nixon would be victimized by the public’s ignorant fear of things psychiatric” and that the column “would be thought incorrigibly partisan and venal” for launching yet another last-minute campaign smear. Nixon’s spokesman later said that Pearson and Anderson “deserve credit” for spiking the story, which “probably would have changed the results of the election.”

  Five nights later, on November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president with 43 percent of the popular vote, a margin of less than one percent over Hubert Humphrey. With nearly 14 percent of the ballots, independent George Wallace almost cost Nixon the election. But it was enough: Richard Nixon—battered and bruised but at long last victorious—was finally headed to the White House.

  Any possible truce between the president-elect and the “Merry-Go-Round” columnists would prove short-lived. Just nine days after Nixon’s election, Drew Pearson struck again, publicly announcing at a press conference what he had chosen not to publish in his column: that Nixon had “psychiatric problems.” In a speech to reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, Pearson stated not only that Dr. Hutschnecker had provided psychotherapy treatments to Nixon but also that the doctor had expressed concern that his onetime patient had problems “standing up under great pressure.” As one chronicler put it, “Correspondents who had previously deemed the rumor unfit to print [now] had an excuse to pursue the story—which they immediately did.” It was the beginning of a trend that would continue for the next generation in which the Washington press corps would exploit the titillation of political scandal while pretending to do otherwise by dressing it up as reporting on how other media outlets covered the story.

  Nixon was furious. His press secretary declared, “I simply will not comment in any way on a Pearson speech, utterance or anything else. It’s totally untrue, of course. Most of his columns are.” Hutschnecker told reporters that Pearson’s remarks were “absolutely false.” Even The Washington Post blasted its columnist for the “decision to bring the report to public attention now without offering any evidence to sustain it . . . It was a serious disservice to air a rumor of such vaporous character.” For his part, Pearson tried to fend off criticism by feigning admiration for his longtime enemy: “Personally I sympathize with Nixon and the mental strain under which he has labored. He deserves credit for getting help with his problems of stress and strain.”

  The president-elect did not appreciate Pearson’s ostentatious display of compassion. At Nixon’s direction, his communications director Herb Klein sent telegrams to hundreds of newspaper editors in an attempt to kill coverage of the columnist’s remarks. “Obviously,” Klein said, “Pearson had volunteered the rumor story before the press club as a vitriolic punch at the President-elect he had openly expressed dislike for on many public occasions over a twenty-year period.” Undoubtedly true. On the other hand, for once Pearson had refrained from uncorking his poison just before the election and instead waited until voters had already made their choice before spreading the noxious fumes. Jack Anderson, for one, was disappointed; he believed Nixon’s psychotherapy was a “legitimate story” that should have been published before Election Day. Unlike the more urbane Pearson, Anderson viewed psychiatrists as quacks and was automatically suspicious of anyone who sought their help.

  In any case, in the aftermath of Nixon’s election, the muckrakers received an anguished letter from the prison cell of Mickey Cohen. “I wonder if you can possibly imagine the shock that I sit here under tonight?” the mobster wrote. “In my wildest dreams [never] could I ever have visualized or imagined 17 or 18 years ago that the likes of Richard Nixon could possibly become the President of the United States . . . Let’s hope that he isn’t the same guy that I knew as a rough hustler [when he was] a goddamn small-time ward politician. Let’s hope this guy’s thinking has changed, and let’s hope it’s for the betterment of our country.”

  But it was not to be.

  In the past, Nixon’s capacity to strike back at his adversaries was restrained by the limits of his office. But with his election as president, he became the most powerful man on the planet, his retaliatory might second to none. Another man might have spent his time savoring his triumphal elevation to the White House. Not Nixon. “This was an ego finely tuned to believe that it was nothing unless it was everything,” author Rick Perlstein noted, “one for which winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing—but which even victory could never fully satisfy.”

  Indeed, the month after his election, the president-elect instructed his staff to dredge through old newspaper columns in search of “smears of Richard Nixon back through the years,” especially “the more vicious press comments.” A month later, on the eve of his inauguration, he took time out to remind aides “to see that someone is assigned to read the Pearson columns for the purpose of determining whether anyone in the Administration has violated my counsel for them not to talk to his people.”

  At what should have been the crowning pinnacle of his career, Nixon was still obsessed by past wrongs. “Enemies had always been essential to him, they fueled his drive, he had always, in some deep psychic way, needed them, as some people need to bite against a sore tooth,” journalist David Halberstam wrote. “Now, now that he was President, he would make them pay; he would not coopt them, that was too easy. Rather he would cut them off, crush them.”

  Richard Nixon was ready to begin his presidency.

  PART III

  POWER

  5

  THE PRESIDENT AND THE COLUMNIST

  Inauguration day—January 20, 1969—dawned chilly and gray in Washington. Hundreds of demonstrators lined the streets to protest the Vietnam War, chanting obscenities, burning American flags, throwing stones at the new president’s motorcade. In victory as in defeat, Richard Nixon remained beleaguered, a polarizing figure in polarizing times.

  Six months later, the Nixon White House was shaken by its first domestic scandal. Once again, the troublemaker was Jack Anderson. As before, the investigative reporter’s focus was fueled by homophobia, this time physically centered in
the Watergate building, which would eventually become the eternal symbol of Nixonian notoriety. The fancy new apartment complex, overlooking the Potomac River just a mile from the White House, was now home to the new president’s top advisors: Attorney General John Mitchell and other Cabinet members, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, and long-standing Nixon loyalists Rose Mary Woods and Murray Chotiner. These Watergate residences, no less than the White House itself, now became the site of intrigue and infighting among the President’s staff. In particular, Nixon veterans Woods and Chotiner had been pushed to the sidelines by Haldeman and the President’s other top aide of Germanic descent, John Ehrlichman. Relative newcomers, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were collectively—and unaffectionately—known as the “Berlin Wall” because they blocked access to Nixon. Indeed, when Woods was informed that she had been exiled to a basement room far from the Oval Office, she yelled at the president-elect with uncharacteristic profanity: “Go fuck yourself!” Chotiner also was “too old and too much a reminder of the rough-stuff origins of the early Nixon to be up front as top staff dog,” Anderson noted. But rather than shout obscenities at the President, Chotiner was more typically devious in the way he handled being frozen out of power. Just weeks after Nixon’s inauguration, the President’s old political guru retaliated by setting in motion a chain of events that led to fabricated charges of a gay White House sex ring.

  Chotiner’s revenge began with an approach to the dreaded Jack Anderson through their mutual friend, the ubiquitous Washington lobbyist Irv Davidson. Chotiner and Davidson had much in common: both had been raised in Pittsburgh’s close-knit Jewish community; both had transformed themselves into wealthy Washington influence-peddlers by representing mobbed-up clients; and both had befriended Nixon years before he became president. At Chotiner’s request, Davidson put out a feeler to Anderson, who assured his friend that he would not rebuff a White House overture. Chotiner then phoned Anderson to suggest that he “drop by to pay a courtesy call and talk a little business.” The muckraker was puzzled but curious: “What could he possibly want with me?” Anderson wondered. “At every juncture of Nixon’s rise, every campaign, every crisis, our column had been Nixon’s avowed enemy.” But Anderson had always taken care to keep relations with Chotiner personally cordial despite their professional differences. The White House consigliere soon visited the newsman’s office. “In the flesh, Chotiner was not much of an ogre,” Anderson wrote in an unpublished manuscript. “Short of stature, he was almost avuncular, a mellowed elder statesman of jugular politics.”

  “Jack,” Chotiner told the reporter, “I’m speaking for the President when I say that we would like to let bygones be bygones and start off fresh with you fellows.” Anderson amiably returned the gesture, responding that he and Drew Pearson believed that “every new President was entitled to a period of neutrality and the benefit of the doubt.” “We can be of help to you,” Chotiner continued. “We know the need you have for information about what’s going on and the President has authorized me to offer you our help. Whenever you want to know something that you’re having a hard time getting at, call me and we’ll see that you get it.” Anderson replied that he was happy to hear that. The two men shook hands and parted. “I could not see a very long life for the Chotiner alliance,” Anderson decided, figuring that “it was only a matter of time before we’d be at sword’s point.” The veteran newsman was astute enough to recognize the “danger that I would be used by the Nixon White House as a vehicle for dubious information it was trying to propagate for its own interests. But this troubled me little; give me the information, I told myself cock-surely, and I’ll happily be the judge of whether it checks out and of who is using whom.”

  Before long, Chotiner presented Anderson with a story tip that was at once sensationalistic, self-serving, and false: that Chotiner’s White House rivals Haldeman and Ehrlichman were gay lovers. Chotiner told Anderson that the two pillars of the “Berlin Wall,” along with Haldeman’s handsome twenty-eight-year-old assistant Dwight Chapin, regularly “engaged in homosexual and perverted activities” early in the morning before reporting to work at the White House. Chotiner claimed the homosexual trysts took place in Haldeman’s Watergate apartment and across the street at the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, where the White House trio was often joined by “a Naval officer who is a notorious homosexual.” Chotiner said that Ehrlichman had been spotted at the Watergate picking up Haldeman and the sailor in a Mustang sports car.

  It was a patently ludicrous charge—Nixon’s senior aides were straight-arrow husbands with children—but it was a measure of the era’s homophobia that even the threat of such false gossipmongering could pack such a political punch. Anderson tried to verify the lurid allegations by dispatching his staff to conduct surveillance outside Haldeman’s Watergate residence and at the motel across the street. Every day for six weeks, legman Joe Trento and a photographer staked out the premises, beginning at four a.m., trying to look as inconspicuous as possible while keeping an eye on the two locations. If necessary, Trento said, Anderson wanted them to break in and photograph the White House aides in flagrante delicto. “I thought it was insane,” Trento remembered. “It was just bizarre.” Trento saw Haldeman entering and exiting the Watergate but never spotted Ehrlichman, Chapin, the navy officer, or the Mustang, let alone any sexual encounters between the presidential advisors. “Jack was convinced the story was true,” Trento recalled, “and was angry that we weren’t finding anything.” Trento concluded that “Murray Chotiner was just jealous of this new Nazi crowd [Ehrlichman and Haldeman] that Nixon had brought in to the White House” and was merely trying to undermine the competition. But Anderson wanted to keep Chotiner happy and decided to escalate his investigation.

  On June 11, 1969, Anderson dropped by unannounced at the office of his old source Deke DeLoach, the deputy FBI director who had previously leaked dirt on Martin Luther King’s sex life. Anderson laid out what he called the “very damaging information” he had received from an “absolutely reliable” but unnamed Nixon advisor about a gay sex ring in the White House. Flabbergasted, DeLoach told Anderson that the FBI “could not sit on a story of this nature” and would have to report it to President Nixon. Anderson said he had no objection but “wanted his name to be kept out of it.”

  DeLoach immediately contacted his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, and wrote an official memo about Anderson’s inflammatory charge. Hoover seized on the accusation and passed it on to the President through Rose Mary Woods, Chotiner’s Watergate neighbor and compatriot, who was also smoldering from being pushed out of Nixon’s inner circle. “Nothing could grab Nixon’s attention faster” than an allegation about “a coterie of homosexuals at the highest levels of the White House,” Ehrlichman recalled, and the President “immediately called Hoover for the details.” The director was only too happy to oblige his new boss. “There is a ring of homosexualists at the highest levels of the White House,” Hoover gravely announced. He made certain that Attorney General Mitchell and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were also briefed about the FBI’s sensitive new investigation of presidential “deviates.”

  Mitchell was assigned the unenviable task of informing Haldeman and Ehrlichman. After dinner with the two aides and Nixon on the presidential yacht Sequoia, the attorney general gave the White House advisors a ride home in his limousine. “Mitchell got out of the car, walked us away so the driver wouldn’t hear and told us Hoover had come up with this homosexual report,” Haldeman remembered. Mitchell informed the men that there was corroborating evidence in the form of photos showing them “going in and out of each others’ villas late at night” at the presidential compound in Key Biscayne, Florida. The explanation was perfectly innocent—they met each other to watch a movie together after work—but Chapin realized that because they were unaccompanied by their wives, “anyone with a sinister motive” could cause “immense” damage. “Jack Anderson’s column would’ve been the one place” in the mainstream media capable of publishing suc
h an incendiary story, Chapin recognized, and that would be enough to “send the wolves off.” The White House communications director begged Anderson for mercy, asking “what we could do to disprove” the allegation and prevent it from being published.

  Meantime, with the President next door in the Oval Office, Hoover personally cross-examined Nixon’s men under oath in the White House Cabinet room to discover if there was “any sexual contact” between them or any other “gay cell” in the White House. The FBI director also dispatched his trusted assistant W. Mark Felt—later revealed to be the famous secret source called “Deep Throat”—along with a stenotypist to transcribe testimony. All three aides asserted their heterosexual innocence and began keeping careful logs of their whereabouts, day and night, to fend off any further allegations. “I had good alibis for the dates alleged,” Ehrlichman recalled. “I was elsewhere with other people, including a satisfactory number of women. I answered all Felt’s questions under oath . . . But I was not sure I had convinced him of my sexual orientation. He was coolly non-committal.”

  Hoover worried that the homosexual rumor had been “dumped” in his lap so that Anderson could report that the FBI had launched an official investigation, thereby transforming the unsubstantiated rumor into a newsworthy story. Worse, Hoover feared that if he now failed to look into Anderson’s bogus charge, the muckraker could accuse the FBI of a cover-up. Hoover’s solution was to execute an act of bureaucratic jujitsu that would simultaneously protect his hind flank while strengthening his position with the new president: he locked up the evidence exonerating Nixon’s aides in his personal safe, the better to suppress the allegations from publicity but protect the FBI if Anderson ever accused Hoover of failing to follow up on them.